Creating Resilient Communities

RES LIENCEPart 1 Report:

Creating Resilient Communities

The Salvation Army - Southern Territory

The Salvation Army, Area Command of Greater New Orleans | EnviRenew

Principal funding for this report was provided by FedEx Global Citizenship.

The EnviRenew Resilience Report Part 1 was authored and prepared by:

Lindsay JonkerAlexandra MillerDana Brechwald

March 2011

The opinions expressed in the EnviRenew Resilience Report, Part I do not necessarily represent the views of The Salvation Army, FedEx Global Citizenship, or any other sponsoring or participating organizations or agencies.

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Table of Contents

Preface: Shane O’Connor 5From Three-Walled Homes to Building Back Better

Executive Summary 7

Section 1: Tools for Thinking 9

A Proposed Framework for Understanding the Nature of Disasters 11

Typical Observed Phases of Disaster Recovery (in the United States) 15

Limited Window of Recovery Funding 18

The Tipping Point as a Mechanism in Neighborhood Recovery 20

Tipping Point Strategies as Part of Long-Term Community Recovery 22

A Framework for the Value Proposition of Resilience Building for Communities 27

Section 2: The Triple Bottom Line: A Framework for Resilience and Recovery Actions 28

The Social Sector: Build Community Capacity and Social Capital 30

Community Capacity: Leverage Internal Resources 32

Social Capital: Attract External Resources 34

Manage Expectations for the Long-Term Recovery Timeline 36

The Economic Sector: Leverage Recovery Funds and Attract New Capital 40

Match Pre-Disaster Preparation and Insurance Coverage to Post-Disaster Needs for Capital 42

Maintain Business and Market Continuity 44

Invest in Human Capital as well as Industries 45

The Physical Sector: Adapt the Physical Environment with Standards, Maps, Data and Plans 46

Maintain Actionable and Enforceable Physical Plans 48

Examine Policies and Standards for Effects on Real Estate Markets 50

Keep Land and Buildings in Commerce Post-Disaster by Creating Streamlined, Place-focused Processes 52

Monitor the Physical Environment using Open Data Sets and Informative Maps of Recovery 54

Key Points 57

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Preface

I clearly remember a conversation I had with Major Ethan Frizzell of The Salvation Army in New Orleans. We were discussing ongoing recovery efforts in New Orleans after Katrina and he referred to “three-walled homes.” He explained that in many cases, teams of well-meaning volunteers were coming to town, throwing up the front and side walls of a house, and then going back home. Perhaps not literally, but the quality of many of the homes going up were substandard to say the least.

In the midrange, homes were being built that were solid and OK, basically putting back what was there before. But, Major Frizzell was pricked in his heart with the notion of “building back better.” This concept was especially important to him in light of the work of The Salvation Army and their “ministry of Presence,” where they aim to be in the community the “hands and feet” of the caring Creator. How could he not consider ways to restore devastated communities in ways that would best honor Him?

In that context, EnviRenew was born. The Salvation Army began working with leaders from the US Green Building Council, Harvard University, the national-

thought leaders from around the country. I “lucked into” the conversation when I called Major Frizzell to see if FedEx could help The Salvation Army commemorate

recognition to the fact that the recovery continues. That connection led to FedEx sponsoring The Salvation Army Resiliency Summit in August 2010. Leading up to, during and after the Summit, I learned about The Salvation Army’s EnviRenew initiative.

After the Summit, I had the unique opportunity to

architectural drawings for four 800 square-foot

in a New Orleans neighborhood that had been hard hit by Katrina. The Salvation Army worked closely with the US Green Building Council in concert with their annual Natural Talent Design Competition to generate the architectural plans. Then, The Salvation Army helped convene an esteemed panel of expert judges from across the US. They were mostly from the worlds of architecture and academia (I was there as the “corporate sponsor” judge…not an expert!). They also vetted the plans with the local community to ensure they were in keeping with

Shane O’Connor,FedEx Global Citizenship

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the look and feel of the neighborhood and included a local community leader as a judge. What was different about this particular competition was that the winning designs were actually going to be built.In addition to the sustainable homes component, The Salvation Army EnviRenew initiative had a range of other sustainability components (more low cost and simple to apply) that would help homeowners in the community lower their home operating costs while also increasing their “environmentally friendly” factor and the level of comfort they would afford their occupants.

With nearly 700 airplanes and tens of thousands of trucks, FedEx has been assisting disaster relief agencies with complimentary transportation services in response to disasters around the world for decades. In recent years, we have begun helping with some disaster preparedness initiatives. One dollar invested in preparedness has been shown to equate to seven dollars saved in recovery. The one area that is most daunting to consider in disaster response is long term recovery. With limited resources, where can FedEx invest them where they will make the most impact?

One answer has been EnviRenew. This initiative is one of the most creative and innovative I have seen in the long term recovery space. EnviRenew was recognized with an Innovation Award in 2011 by

organizations and volunteers working in all phases of disaster preparedness, response, relief, recovery, and mitigation. The work done in New Orleans was so impressive and impactful that FedEx offered to provide funding for this report. We wanted to help capture the lessons learned and forward thinking that has been demonstrated to date by the leaders of this initiative.

EnviRenew was launched by Major Frizzell and carried forward by Lindsay Jonker, Alexandra Miller and a team of outstanding interns and principals. My vision is to see the EnviRenew approach replicated across the country and around the world, raising the bar in long term recovery from three-walled homes to building back better. This report will help provide the basis for doing just that.

Shane O’Connor

Program AdvisorFedEx Global Citizenship

Twitter: @oconnorshane

PREFACE

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The EnviRenew Resilience mission statement was created by the EnviRenew Resilience principals and interns to articulate the need for immediate engagement in developing a consistent and sustainable long-term recovery approach to disaster. This report focuses on the results that EnviRenew Resilience has achieved in developing a process that addresses advanced long-term planning for resilience. Developing a better understanding of the resilience

on long-range goals, and allow institutions, public agencies and private organizations to better allocate their resources to support long-term as well as short-term reconstruction in post-disaster communities.

The key driver noted in the mission statement is action. The success of pre-disaster resilience and of post-disaster recovery is entirely reliant on action. Unlike emergency disaster plans that can lie relatively dormant on shelves, with a periodic drill to ensure awareness, resilience and long-term recovery require sustained

The other key aspect to ensuring resilience and a sustained recovery is inclusion. Inclusion needs to be

much of the population in the social pyramid is part of these process and secondly, inclusion addresses the need for local communities to be open to new ideas, new visions for their future, and new ways of doing things to recover their aspirations. Both these aspects are critical to delivering robust resilience and recovery actions.

This report provides tools for strategically pursuing long-term recovery. Section I of the report is devoted to “tools for thinking”; these are big-picture methods for deciding how to focus long-term recovery efforts and funding. These tools include typical timelines, funding strategies, and geographical methods for making recovery as effective as possible and building resilience for the future. Section II of the report

by dividing potential responses based on the triple bottom line: the social, economic, and physical characteristics of communities. Section II includes

resilience, as well as case studies that show how communities have implemented similar strategies.

The goal of building resilience during long-term recovery is to restore the relevance and competitiveness of a community in order to improve quality of life for all residents. Long-term recovery and resilience is not about rebuilding exactly what was in place before a disaster; instead, achieving resilience requires a community to think about future plans that change the community’s trajectory and restore it as an asset within the national or regional constellation of urban environments.

Goal of this Document This publication is the result of a discussion and research effort undertaken in mid-2009 by The Salvation Army following a generous research gift from FedEx Global Citizenship. The discussion followed from an invitation from The Salvation Army to a select multi-disciplinary group to discuss and exchange new ideas and experience to better understand post-disaster long-

- EnviRenew Resilience Mission Statement Developed by Principals and Interns, Memphis, June 2011.

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term recovery and pre-disaster resilience building for communities. The invitation and roundtable discussion was inspired by the ‘on the ground’ long-term recovery work The Salvation Army was undertaking in New Orleans through its EnviRenew fund and program supporting neighborhood recovery efforts. The group was comprised of individuals, Resilience Principals, who either in their own right or as part of their organizations are nationally acknowledged to have a deep professional and human concern with post-disaster long-term recovery of the communities and neighborhoods that we are all a part of. The group’s

sectors, and drew from across the social, economic and environmental areas of activity. Over the course of the summer of 2011, a set of sponsored Resilience Interns hosted in the three cities of New Orleans, San Francisco, and Washington DC, researched and engaged in meaningful and lengthy discussions with their host organizations and those organizations’ networks. The goal of this publication is to distill what was learned through those conversations and the discussion with the Resilience Principals.

The effort to establish this platform of discussion followed the FedEx-sponsored Resiliency Summit

anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The intent of the Resiliency Summit was to have a serious and searching discussion across neighborhoods and communities about was learnt from the recovery efforts after the tragic events that followed August 29th, 2005 and

two big insights that have followed from these frank

at least as important as emergency disaster response and preparedness for a disaster. The second is that pre-disaster resilience building must be a conscious and deliberate policy and practice, in the same way

to deliver on the resilience promise to better enable community recovery following a traumatic event.

The intent of this publication is to describe both the big guiding principles and the nuances that can be understood following these two key insights. Therefore, please read this document not as a comprehensive framework, but rather a start point for better understanding how as neighbors and residents we can better prepare those in our immediate surroundings, whether at home or at work, for the big shocks that can occur without warning.

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Tools for Thinking: Big-Picture Ideas about Disaster, Resilience, and Long-Term Recovery

- Doug Ahlers, “Acting in Time Initiative,” Harvard Kennedy School of Government

In light of the increased scale and occurrence of disasters over the last decade, increased discussion and awareness has followed on how communities and neighborhoods can better prepare themselves for the unexpected. Much of the discussion has revolved around the term “resilience” and how it can be implemented. Increasingly researchers from

traveled widely, seeking out resilient communities in an effort to distill and implement their characteristics in both vulnerable and progressive communities seeking to mitigate potential future events.

above provides a superb start point to understanding how resilience as a policy and practice can provide a lens to better prepare communities for the unexpected. Critically, the description recognizes that disasters are different in nature, and that not all are immediate and sudden. This point helps explain that resilience and disasters can be seen as part of a cycle (see Diagram 1) of both real activities and policies that can be implemented based on the existing condition of a community, pre- or post-disaster. Is the community recovering after a sudden traumatic event, or is it caught in a slowly evolving and compounding series of crises resulting in a negative long-run outcome for the given community? The cycle in Diagram 1 is instructive because, in the

response has recognized that disaster preparedness is a vital pre-disaster component for communities and cities, long-term recovery experts have realized that resilience building and mitigation before a

of post-disaster long-term recovery activities.

Diagram 1. The Resilience Cycle

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Relief & Response

Long-Term Recovery

Mitigation & Preparedness

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In this following section we will introduce a proposed framework for the different types of disasters, and further explore the connections and transitions between long-term recovery and mitigation and resilience building, and preparedness and emergency response. Most importantly, this section is a compilation of several overall lessons learned, and not a comprehensive toolkit. Instead we wish to offer a range of proposed tools and frameworks to spur deeper discussion that (we hope) can translate into real-time activities and policy positions that will assist that our neighbors and fellow citizens can better manage their vulnerabilities to better absorb and overcome potential traumatic events or existing negative states within their communities.

Note: Though we will be addressing long-term recovery and overall resilience in this section, we

of hindsight, it is easier to understand the value in the model when examining communities that have already experienced a disaster. To this end we will

preparedness, as a policy and range of practices that can reduce the negative consequences of a disaster.

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A Proposed Framework for Understanding the Nature of Disasters

become increasingly noted and recognized that the

Disasters are increasingly measured by their long-term outcomes, rather than by simple measurements of the direct damage caused by a disaster event itself1. Though this position remains somewhat controversial,

term outcomes will help communities to understand and manage the cascading consequences that can result from the initial systems failure after a traumatic event. Disasters represent a mix of both the direct effects of the extreme event, and the fact that these effects can compound previously existing problems and vulnerabilities within a city, town, or region.

Today, “emergency response” is the well-developed

immediate effects of extreme events. By recognizing that disasters also include the long-term effects of these events, localities will be better able to address the blend of different temporal and spatial characteristics that long-term recovery must address to effectively deliver genuine recovery of an impacted community.

controversial than emergency response, because it requires communities to be brutally honest with themselves - plans for a strong, resilient recovery can only be determined if a community knows where it

stands and where it wants to go in the future. To help

categorize disasters into three different types: Fast, Slow and Hybrid Disasters. This categorization uses a community’s pre-disaster trajectory to

high-quality, competitive city or town for the future. The matrix below provides a brief summary of these disaster types, while the following pages will elaborate on each type’s particular characteristics.

The disaster framework offered in this section is both scalable and can occur as simultaneous scenarios within a town or city. By scalable, we mean that a hybrid and a fast disaster condition can occur at the neighborhood, suburb, city or county level. Similarly,

means that within a given city experiencing an extreme event, one community can experience the even as a “fast” disaster, while an adjacent community can experience the same event as a “slow” disaster.

By recognizing that long-term recovery is a complex task, which is separate from (but related to) emergency response, we can start to work with long-term recovery as a set of tools that represents a protracted commitment to delivering the quality and future prospects of our community lives and the built environment we inhabit.

“Fast” disaster “Slow” disaster “Hybrid” disaster

Pre-disaster trajectory Upward (increasing population, economic growth)

Downward (decreasing population, economic decline)

Downward (decreasing population, economic decline)

Nature of event Sudden (e.g. earthquake, tornado)

Long-term (decline and disinvestment as a kind of disaster)

Sudden and long-term (traumatic event compounds previous problems)

Table 1. Fast, Slow, and Hybrid Disasters

1 Business Civic Leadership Center. A Critical Role: Top Ten Policies That States Need to Recover from Disasters. 2009.

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Fast Disasters

“Fast” disasters are characterized by communities that are on an upward and relatively stable improving trajectory of long-term economic, social and environmental outcomes – until a sudden, damaging disaster event occurs. After a fast disaster event, local

a strong rebuilding effort will get the city back to where it was in a few years. In fact, the post-event crisis yields a strategic investment opportunity to put a community or city on an improved path.

‘Fast’ disasters may be natural disasters, such as earthquakes or tornadoes, but they can also be caused by human actions – the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the attacks on September 11 also represent this type of disaster. These disaster events represent an abrupt shock to a community, which results in a

term opportunities for the affected community.

Time (Years)

EVENT Quality of life

FAST DISASTER

Pre-disaster trend-line Post-disaster resumed

‘REBUILD’ trend-line

“Strategic Reinvestment Opportunity”

Diagram 2. “Fast” Disaster - Rebuilding vs. Strategic Reinvestment

Sidebar: Ongoing Disasters

Fast disasters have another potential characteristic: they can be unending in nature. Two current examples are Fukushima, Japan, and Christchurch, New Zealand. While both were fast disasters requiring evacuation, the

is largely accepted by victims of the nuclear disaster in Japan, New Zealand continues to confront the very

response it may be emotionally unbearable. This strengthens the evidence of the need for a separate long-term recovery group that can grapple with tough ethical and moral questions regarding the recovery of a community.


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Slow Disasters

‘Slow’ disasters are more elusive to characterize than the discrete “fast” disaster events like tornadoes or earthquakes. Slow disasters are characterized by protracted decline and are usually recognizable by a slow series of downward “tipping points” (a later section will discuss tipping points in more detail). This results in a long-run decline in opportunities for a community and its residents.

Examples of cities affected with slow disasters are those with high amounts of foreclosure, depopulation and disinvestment, and also those whose daily lives are increasingly and erratically interrupted due to increased extreme weather. While the debate about ‘climate change’ continues, evidence from re-insurance and insurance claims over recent years bears out that some metro areas and their communities are

subject to increasing climate volatility that negatively impacts the opportunities and overall quality of life of its resident communities. Some metro areas have recognized “climate change” in their policy actions of “climate adaptation and mitigation” and have embarked on direct policy and actionable community measures to counteract the expected threats to their communities. It is here where the role of resilience building within communities, as a mitigation measure to long-run decline and potential emergent threats, is most similar to the role that preparedness measures plays out with post-disaster emergency response.

Once there is a conscious awareness of the a protracted and likely volatile decline in a community’s long-term prospects, this trend can be countered by the engagement of a “strategic reinvestment opportunity.”

Time (Years)

‘Tipping Point’ events

Quality of life

‘SLOW’ DISASTER

Pre-decline trend-line

Long–run declining trend-line

‘Tipping Point’ events



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Diagram 3. “Slow” Disaster - Rebuilding vs. Strategic Reinvestment

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Hybrid Disasters

“Hybrid” disasters represent a combination of slow and fast disasters; they can be construed as a dual shock, or “one-two punch,” to the long-run fortunes of a community. Hybrid disasters are in many respects the most vicious and insidious, as the outcomes of the sudden “fast” disaster will exploit and expose the previous legacy problems that characterized the slow disaster. These disasters often present the most challenges to recovery, due to the blend of legacy unattended problems compounded by new and unexpected challenges.

Communities in danger of this kind of disaster are those that are already in a suboptimal state due to being in a slow disaster “mode,” a decline due to disinvestment, foreclosure, or any range of steadily narrowing economic and social future options and opportunities for the resident population. This protracted decline is intercepted by an abrupt extreme event that creates

a natural disaster, or it could represent economic or

class families that depended on a living wage. The “one-two punch” of the hybrid disaster could be a blend of economic, environmental or social aspects, or it could represent a doubling up of a singular aspect.

Successful application of long-term recovery in a hybrid disaster situation will impact the viability of the community over the long run. Recovery will be challenged by legacy problems and voids that lead to the previous “slow” disaster state of the given community. The ability to attract and retain the necessary resources, both human and

on a new trajectory of recovery and growth.

Diagram 4. “Hybrid” Disaster - Rebuilding vs. Strategic Reinvestment

Quality of life

Pre-decline trend-line


Time (Years)

NEW ORLEANS ‘observed at the neighbourhood level’

Post-disaster resumed ‘REBUILD’ trend-line?

EVENT

When ?


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Typical Observed Phases of Disaster Recovery (in the United States)

Diagram 5. Phases of Disaster Recovery

Equipped with a better understanding of the types of disasters and how they will impact a community’s prospects and long-term outcomes, the above diagram indicates the various phases a community typically goes through after a disaster. These particular phases were observed following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, though it is clear that other disaster events are at least partially conforming to the phases and time frames as described below and indicated in Diagram 3.

Before a disaster, it is important to note that there are two distinct sets of activities that create disaster “readiness”: “Disaster Preparedness” activities and “Resilience and Mitigation” activities. These two sets of actions will inevitably have a fair amount of overlap in their timing, approach, and activities, but in practice there are subtle but important

Disaster Preparedness activities are typically well-

practiced and familiar in many areas prone to

on preparing for the emergency response phase and short-term recovery. Preparedness activities can include putting together emergency kits, practicing response drills, and putting resources into emergency response equipment and systems such

While these types of activities typically focus on concrete actions, some theoretical planning is also involved, such as the creation of debris cleanup plans.

Resilience and Mitigation activities are typically activities that look towards long-term recovery after a disaster. They may seem less concrete and more theoretical than disaster preparedness activities, and involve actions such as networking and relationship-building, leadership structure reorganization, awareness-raising, or research.

Event Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5End of 60 month

post-disaster cycle

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The understanding is that putting in time, energy, and resources now, recovery activities later will be smoother, quicker, and more focused.

both long-term recovery and disaster response, such as mitigating homes against earthquakes or

people survive the disaster and need fewer outside resources in the response phase, it also minimizes the need for extensive long-term recovery and keeps cities and communities more intact after a disaster.

Many communities practice Disaster Preparedness activities as part of their established emergency response practices, but few have begun to see the value of Resilience and Mitigation. This may largely be because it is easy to see the return on dollars spent for

or plan, to show for your time and effort. This may not be the case for Resilience and Mitigation - the return on the investment may not appear until years later, and may not ever be measurable. Disaster Preparedness activities are also better tested and documented, so people have an easy and understandable starting point, whereas many people do not know where to begin on Resilience and Mitigation activities. However, both types of activities impact long-term recovery, and ideally communities practice both.

Post-Disaster Phases I through VI2:

Phase I – Emergency Disaster ResponseThis is the phase that follows the immediate aftermath of a fast or hybrid type of disaster. Key response is

agencies such as the Red Cross and The Salvation Army. The phase tends to last approximately 90

of funds spent on emergency response. The pre-existence of disaster plans and familiarity of state

Phase II – Assessment and Cleanup, emphasis on Insurance and Re-Insurance Assessments

and counterparties to response plans. Government representatives and teams of emergency response

sector specialists, and volunteers. Once the immediate primary care concerns in the community are concluded, this phase commences with cleanup as the priority. The cleanup is impacted by the critical insurance and

only the capital available to the emergency response efforts, abut also the long-term recovery efforts. This phase is also marked by the commencement of debates about how to recover and rebuild. The emotional intensity of these debates will demarcate lines between agencies that will often directly impact their ability to partner and leverage their resources during the later long-term recovery phases.

community outreachOverlapping with Phase II, this period often

to allocate both resources and responsibilities. If resilience and mitigation plans have not been prepared, the emergency response and recovery plans and activities are rapidly assembled. These will often become the baseline documents upon which many assumptions will be based. It is characterized by the mobilization of the private sector, who need to make both business continuity decisions, and local residents who are eager to reclaim their property. It is

interests between emergency response and long-term

and actors. The negative outcome of these gaps could have been countered or reduced by resilience-building community activities before the extreme event.

2 Paul Taylor, SRP Development ‘Speaking Points on Recovery after Disaster’, Tulane University – October 2010.


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Phase IV – Initial Implementation PlanThe pre-development and pre-construction phase usually commences 18 to 36 months after the extreme event. This phase is characterized by the ‘as planned’ reduction of the federal government direct involvement and transfer of the majority of activities to state and

manifest themselves into co-ordination issues in the rebuild and recovery efforts. This period also generally witnesses the vanguard of rebuilding taken up by the private sector that does not require partnerships or capital allocations to recovery themselves. The lack of coordination at this phase will have long-run problems for capital absorption. At the community

disadvantage” game with returning residents waiting for others, as they will be subject to higher return costs.

Phase V – Follow-through Implementation Plan This phase is the longest period as it marks the period when rebuilding and construction gets underway. Commencing around the 36-month mark, the second implementation phase should mark at scale recovery efforts, and is ideally characterized by high degrees

private sectors. However, the efforts of this period are impacted by the limitation of the risks not mitigated during Phase III. This period most strongly

economic and social momentum the community will

prospects. This period will end on or around the 60th month when the awareness and response to the event

counter donor fatigue and most non-community actors recognizing the current state of the recovery represents the “new normal” of the impacted community.

Phase VI – Long Run Outcome or “New Normal”

majority of recovery funding and resources (human and capital) have left the impacted community. This phase represents the new reality that the community

event. This period encapsulates the degree of success the community has had in both overcoming the shock from the extreme event and all the legacy problems that was exacerbated by the traumatic occurrence. Most importantly, this is the period that the community must re-engage and re-invigorate its resiliency and mitigation plans to prepare for the next disaster cycle. This period will allow new goal setting and long-range

assessment of its current state. It can be viewed as a

of the resources it is able to maintain and retain or attract.


Diagram 6. The Resilience Cycle: A Reminder

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Relief & Response

Long-Term Recovery

Mitigation & Preparedness

Disaster Event

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Limited Window of Recovery Funding

has been that disaster response and long-term recovery have a limited window to be effective. Following discussions with a range of funders across the private

investing in a community’s recovery. The reasons

competing attention from more recent extreme events.

year election cycle of local governments, meaning that the recovery effort would either have been handled predominantly by a single administration, with the success or failure attributable to that

administration, or across two administrations meaning that the recovery performance can be aggregated.

Given this limited window of funding and the danger of hitting the “donor fatigue” mark before

recovery demands a high-speed specialist skill set to handle the market dislocations of a city or town that has faced a complete systems collapse. Disaster and long-term recovery face competitive forces for attention with capital and talent existing today in a global economy, and the economics of long-term recovery must compete in a global marketplace for capital and talent to help in the recovery process.

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Emergency $

EVENT $

Typical Funding trend-line

Funding will disappear due to other events – both public and private funds. Small window to ensure rebuilding

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Limited Window of Recovery Funding

Sidebar: Mitigation Reduces Cost of Recovery

importance of spending resources on Resilience

on Resilience and Mitigation pre-disaster may not

the cost of long-term recovery by reducing the amount of rebuilding, increasing coordination and

particularly important due to this inevitable funding

needs. Reducing the number of dollars needed post-disaster by carefully spending resources pre-disaster can drastically reduce this unmet need. Additionally, the number of dollars saved during recovery for every dollar spent on mitigation is far

overall savings during the entire resilience cycle.

Sidebar Diagram 1. Unmet Needs without Mitigation.

Sidebar Diagram 2. With Mitigation, Lower Costs and Fewer Unmet Needs in Long-Term Recovery.

explain to communities and households; it can

a competitive endeavor to those in the healing process. This insight, though, explains the critical need for a separate long-term recovery team, and capital allocation for long-term needs that is separate from emergency response funding. Impatience and optimism for results does not provide emergency response organizations with the space to rationally think through long-term recovery. Yet, displaying a long-term recovery strategy and plan of action can

help leapfrog donors’ surprise that their capital will take a period of time before being actually used to impact the recovery of a community. It will enable

recovery capital based on their own investment

parallel process to the emergency response process.

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EVENT

emergency $

typical funding trend line

$ needed unmet need

PRE-DISASTER POST-DISASTER


EVENT

emergency $

typical funding trend line

$ neededunmet needsavoided

$ invested

recovery savings

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The Tipping Point as a Mechanism in Neighborhood Recovery

The previous sections dealt with typical timelines for building resilience during long-term recovery;

geographic mechanisms that can help promote a resilient recovery process. Doug Ahlers, of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, has observed a “tipping point” mechanism that can help determine the future of a neighborhood or locality. The tipping point describes the need for a “critical mass of investors” to decide to return and improve their properties after a disaster. The most granular manifestation of the tipping point mechanism can be observed on a single neighborhood block – if enough residents return, that block will reach real estate values close or equal to the pre-disaster values. However, it should be noted that there is a baseline assumption within this idea: the “critical mass” of investors cannot be simply located in a single city block without the recovery of other neighborhood and city assets, including jobs, schools, and infrastructure. Instead, the baseline also must include

multiple scales in the overall recovery effort that the tipping point can be reached (See Diagram 4).

The ‘tipping point’ as a mechanism occurs under non-disaster conditions already - and all the time. Generally,

neighborhoods at the margin; that is, neighborhoods that are either seen as undervalued or overvalued. The private marketplace responds to these perceptions by either retracting their investment (resulting in blight)

In a post-disaster environment, the tipping point can actually be used as an investment strategy to drive

long-term recovery. In order to reach critical mass and thereby the scale and speed that are critical to

actors must work together to further these investment strategies and ensure an inclusive, speedy recovery.

to focus activity and intended impact during initial recovery efforts, from which the private marketplace can then expand the recovery as real estate values

mover disadvantage’ from the various investment

impacted neighborhoods and communities because it requires the prioritization of certain recovery areas over others. This is further evidence as to why cross-sectoral co-ordination is required to be able to truly capture the promise of a tipping point strategy.

The tipping point can be a slow approach compared to many of the other disaster recovery tasks, which means that swift recovery of housing and neighborhood assets is critical. Without pre-disaster mitigation and the capacity to accommodate development at scale, many neighborhoods may not adequately recover before the window of funding closes and the opportunity of the tipping point is rendered ineffective. The key to avert this risk is to deliver at scale and speed and get an area and the forthcoming residents ready for occupation.

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The big lesson here is that not every $1 invested in recovery is equal; funds invested based on a geographic strategy will have a larger impact than those simply dedicated to an issue such as blight or rehabilitation.

Diagram 8. “Tipping the Block” - The Tipping Point’s Geographic Recovery Strategy

The Tipping Point as a Mechanism in Neighborhood Recovery

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The above diagram illustrates the tipping-point principle in two parts. The left side displays a series of city blocks that make up a neighborhood. The red blocks are those lowest on the tipping-point scale at right: they likely have a very substantial percentage of blight, pollution, or other negative features that make them very hard to “tip” to become positive neighborhood assets. Rather than pour money into these blocks, neighborhoods should invest money more broadly across the orange and light green blocks that are very close to becoming positive assets. This funding will “tip” these blocks and allow real estate values across the neighborhood to rise.

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Tipping Point Strategies as Part of Long-Term Community Recovery

The following set of visioning tools for long-term recovery represents a combination of the cycle of long-term recovery with use of the tipping point mechanism. The models that follow apply at various spatial scales, from the neighborhood block to the city as a whole. The models borrow heavily from on-the-ground strategic recovery efforts experienced by the EnviRenew team in New Orleans working across multiple neighborhoods and with those communities’ representative groups.

I. Sub-Optimal Recovery – ‘The Status Quo’

Doug Ahlers has developed a tool that explains how the recovery of communities that have been through a disaster is subject to a tipping point condition. In the following graphs, the ‘social welfare utility’ is used to represent a range of inputs that measures the general welfare of a community or city over time.

The current trend in disaster recovery funding, indicated in the ‘Funding Trend’ below the graph, almost always means that the social welfare utility recovery trend-line will be lower than the pre-event social welfare utility trend-line that the community was on before the disaster event. Note that the dropoff of disaster recovery dollars will start to have an impact just as momentum in the recovery is starting to build. The reduction of available capital and resources at this

recovery dollars to maximize their impact. Funders need to revise the nature of their giving in order to improve the odds for communities in recovery.

II. Optimized Recovery – ‘Leapfrogging the Gap’

Ahlers’ work posits that by providing long-term recovery dollars much earlier in the process, it enables communities to ‘jump the gap’ and place them back on the previous trend-line: the orange arrow in Diagram 10. By having an earlier community discussion around long-term recovery, funds can be set aside to address long-term aspirations, increasing the likelihood that the aims for recovery will be achieved. This will allow localities to achieve early momentum with long-term recovery goals and resources, which will in turn enable greater coordination and leveraging opportunities with the emergency response resources operating in the early months and years after a disaster.

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1 time 2 3 4 5 6

Emergency $ Reduced Disaster $

EVENT

‘Optimum’ community welfare trend-line

Actual outcome

Social welfare utility

TYPICAL LONG RUN SCENARIO* w/ Tipping Point Condition

Funding Trend

Diagram 9. Sub-Optimal Recovery: Trying to Bring Back the Status Quo


1 2 3 4 5 6

Emergency $ $ earmarked for long-term recovery

GAP

TYPICAL SCENARIO w/ DELAYED LONG TERM FUNDING START

Funding Trend time


EVENT

Diagram 10. Optimized Recovery: Leapfrogging the Gap with Long-Term Funds

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III. Re-imagining Recovery: ‘Recapturing Long-Term Competitiveness’

EnviRenew’s experience and research in New Orleans supports the need for a separate but parallel process engaged in long-term recovery planning that is established on Day 1 after a disaster event. This process should engage affected citizens to re-imagine their future; this re-imagining process can provide the opportunity to optimize their recovery beyond their previous trend-line. Inspiration for this

from BNIM developed for the small community of Greensburg, Kansas. On the diagram below, the reimagining process is represented by the green arrow.

Re-imagining is the act and practice that a community must undertake to reclaim its upward trajectory and a community’s reinvention of itself and its long-term prospects. Re-imagining asks a community to think beyond the recovery process and imagine itself in

community to consider how it will remain relevant and competitive within its regional or national economy. This planning process includes more than just capital investment; it also involves the ability to attract and

the environment, built and natural. Re-imagining enables recovery dollars to be put to work to assist communities to deploy sustainability as a means to regain their competitiveness after an extreme event.

1 time 2 3 4 5 6 Emergency $ Reduced $

EVENT ‘Optimised’ community welfare outcome


OPTIMAL LONG-TERM RECOVERY SCENARIO – A REIMAGINING!

Funding Trend:

$ for long-term recovery from DAY 1

Diagram 11. Re-Imagining Recovery: Recapturing Long-Term Competitiveness


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Sidebar: The Importance of Reimagining - “A Tale of Two Cities”

wave, which killed 198 island residents and caused over 600 million dollars’ worth of property damage. The earthquake’s epicenter was so close to the island that residents had essentially no warning of the tsunami’s arrival.

Greensburg is a small town in Kansas that is located approximately 110 miles west of Wichita, the nearest major population center. In 2007, Greensburg was struck by an EF5 tornado, which is the tornado type with the strongest winds and the highest potential for damage to human life and property; despite a 20-minute warning through tornado sirens and a declared tornado emergency, 12 lives were lost due to the sheer destructive scale of the storm.

Though Okushiri and Greensburg are geographically distant, they are markedly similar in other ways. Both were small towns even before they were hit by disaster: Okushiri had a population of approximately 4,700 prior to the tsunami, while Greensburg’s population was 1,574 as of the 2000 U.S. census. Both towns relied primarily on long-established economies based on natural resources: Greensburg’s economic

In Okushiri, recovery has focused on memorializing the past and prevention of a similar event. Okushiri recovery investment has included a museum to memorialize the tsunami’s impact and its victims. The majority of investment has focused on physical mitigation, as the Japanese government has built one billion dollars’ worth of physical infrastructure to hold back tsunami waves. This includes fourteen kilometers of seawall up to 38 feet in height, as well as four tsunami

In Greensburg, the recovery operation has focused on the future of the community and using

LEED Platinum standard, one of the highest existing green building standards, for all construction that takes place within their community. The community came to this decision via a literal “big tent”

a 300-person tent where entire families gathered to discuss their dreams for the future. The decision to build LEED Platinum emerged from the potential to attract new jobs in the green energy and green

to build a business incubator where new green businesses could grow and employ local residents.

Okushiri, after pouring funds into physical mitigation, has witnessed a continual decline in population over the last 10 years. After the high-paying construction jobs disappeared, young people and families

of income for the islanders. Greensburg has also declined in population since the tornado occurred, to about half of its pre-storm population, but it continues to complete and attract new investment and recovery opportunities, and appears to be on an upward trajectory of continued long-term recovery.

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Communities

Combining the re-imagining model with pre-disaster resilience and mitigation activities is the most progressive policy, but is also most promising model to help communities both better prepare and more effectively address a post-extreme event state.

Investment in pre-disaster resilience and mitigation for communities promises at least

1. Pre-disaster resilience can improve the pre-disaster social welfare utility of communities: it can improve the trend-line trajectory itself.

2. In the post-disaster condition, resilience-building efforts can reduce the impact

of the disaster, thus creating a shallower dip immediately after the extreme event.

3. Post-disaster momentum leveraging off pre-disaster resilience activities promises both an ability to speed up the return to the pre-disaster trend-line, and surpass the higher trend-line.

4. Reduced post-disaster impacts also reduces the amount of long-term resources needed, so dollars can be better utilized for reimagining and go farther in increasing social welfare.

While this report is largely focused on long-term recovery actions and scenarios, it is important to emphasize that recovery is affected by actions along all phases of the resilience cycle, and the optimal scenario includes resilience actions both pre and post disaster.

Resilience $Re-imagining+ Resilience $

Re-imagining $

Emergency $ Long-term $

Re-imagining withmitigation

Re-imagining

Typical

social

utility(SWU)

time1 2 3 4 5 6

Funding Trend:

improved “SWU” with resilience

“SWU” withoutresilience

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The triple bottom line model provides an overall context for understanding the pre-disaster and post-disaster opportunities for resilience. The triple bottom line looks holistically at a community’s assets and resources: it focuses on the social, economic, and physical sectors of development and how these can operate together to provide better results. This is

private sectors to understand the value proposition that pre-disaster resilience building is able to offer

long-run competitiveness in communities. Most importantly, the triple bottom line approach shows that investment as a preparedness and resilience strategy is a value-creating exercise that can be leveraged into funding opportunities and improve the effectiveness of resources set aside for long-term recovery in a post-disaster scenario. The diagram below offers a way of seeing the range of characteristics and value that pre-disaster resilience building activities can provide.

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A Framework for the Value Proposition of Resilience Building for Communities


CAPACITY EMPOWERMENT

DIVERSITY/REDUNDANCY

STABILITY

ROBUSTNESSREHABILITATION AND

RECONSTRUCTION

Social

Economic

Physical

DISASTER EVENT

(value creation)

(funding opportunities)

Diagram 13. Triple Bottom Line Characteristics of Resilient Communities

Section 2 will use a triple bottom line approach to expand on the types of real-world activities that can be used to build resilience in communities, and to help communities better recover back to relevance and competitiveness with other communities. Throughout Section 2, case studies will help support and explain these actionable recommendations.

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The Triple Bottom Line: A Framework for Resilience and Recovery Actions

When trying to build a resilient society, the triple bottom line viewpoint has two major advantages for communities and individuals.

The triple bottom line system of analysis shows that every community is greater than

social, economic, and physical aspects of every community are interconnected and essential for withstanding and building from the shock of a disaster.

The triple bottom line gives people a common language for talking about a disaster’s effects, which enhances communication among disparate groups and creates a set of common metrics to measure the success of long-term recovery.

The framework on the following page shows the actions that communities can take to build resilience, divided into their triple bottom line components.

COMMUNITY

SOCIALSUBSYSTEM

ECONOMICSUBSYSTEM

PHYSICALSUBSYSTEM

Diagram 14. The Triple Bottom Line.

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CREATE SOCIAL CAPITAL AND LEADERSHIP NET-

WORKS

EMPOWERED AND COMPETENT ACTORS

FOSTER RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT & CREATE

VALUE

UTILIZING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR LONG-

TERM COMPETITIVENESS

MAP ASSETS AND MITIGATE

VULNERABILITIES

BUILD BACK BETTER

Social

Economic

Physical

DISASTER EVENT

Diagram 15. A Framework of Actions that Create Resilience

Framework: Actions that Create Resilience

resilience within the social, economic, and physical sectors, and provides case studies to show how groups of people have attempted to resolve these challenges. Readers should remember that, though

some sectors may seem more urgent than others in addressing the potential for disaster, all of these sectors are necessary to help reimagine and regain the potential of a community after a disaster occurs.

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The Social Sector: Build Community Capacity and Social Capital


CREATE SOCIAL CAPITAL AND LEADERSHIP NET-

WORKS

EMPOWERED AND COMPETENT ACTORSSocial

DISASTER EVENT

The social aspects of resilience are based on ensuring that people have the tools, expertise, resources, and capacity that they need to help themselves and their communities in the long-term recovery from a disaster. By learning to take action together and work with experienced partners, community members, neighborhoods, and businesses can assist in improving collective social welfare both before and after a disaster.

organizations can help empower citizens by setting clear timelines and expectations for long-term recovery,

and then remaining accountable and transparent

Ultimately, social resilience depends on the opportunities for collective action available before and after a disaster. Collective action within neighborhoods, within city blocks, within self-

and citizens, creates the trust, relationships, and competence necessary to rebuild after disaster.

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Note: “Building Our Future” (event pictured above) is an effort through The Salvation Army’s EnviRenew and Emerge programs in New

together with women role models over the course of a day. The women role models are business leaders in architecture, engineering, real estate development, and construction.

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Community Capacity: Leverage Internal Resources

Community capacity allows a neighborhood or town to understand and leverage its internal resources, or to use the assets that already exist within local residents, businesses, and physical features. Strong community capacity will enable residents to participate in imagining and implementing new city futures after a disaster event and meet their own needs internally. The prerequisite for community capacity are trust and relationships between community members, and building these relationships is often not as easy as it seems. Neighbors on the same block may not know one another’s names; there may be more than one neighborhood association claiming territory over the same ten blocks of a city; leaders of different faith groups may never have met. Formal institutions such as city governments or other large organizations may also need to make better connections between their members or employees.

Enabling communities to take action together, and supporting communities that do take action to support greater resilience and recovery, is an essential step to building community capacity. Roundtabling, discussion, and public meetings will not fully build capacity, because people will soon stop coming to meetings if they do not feel they are achieving something. The strongest organizations in terms of community capacity are therefore those that bring people together to accomplish set goals or tasks and that constantly work toward new achievements.

Working together toward particular achievements or goals deepens the relationships between community members beyond simple name or face recognition

that each person brings to the table in achieving a goal. Constantly setting new goals (while keeping these goals manageable) will keep these

strengthen the bonds that already exist. Ultimately, working toward goals and achieving them will create the trust that only emanates from completing

Dr. Rick Weil of Louisiana State University has done a great deal of research to support the strong connection between community capacity and recovery from disaster. His research has found that strong social bonds within groups such as the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs and the Vietnamese community within New Orleans enabled the members of these groups to recover from Hurricane Katrina more quickly and more fully than other groups, including returning to New Orleans, rebuilding housing, and being able to support their families. These groups, though they did not have a great deal of monetary wealth to call upon, were able to leverage their internal skills and relationships to help themselves and each other recover as well as wealthier groups within New Orleans.

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Community Capacity: Leverage Internal Resources

Case Study #1: EnviRenew

After Hurricane Katrina, The Salvation Army started the EnviRenew fund in New Orleans to help local neighborhoods

funds through neighborhood organizations rather than distributing them directly to households. This decision was made explicitly in order to help improve the neighborhoods’ community capacity: as the neighborhood organizations sought out households to deliver grants and worked with them to deliver the necessary documentation, the organizations grew to know and understand the needs of their community even better than before.

As each neighborhood began to see results from the EnviRenew program, more and more people became invested in the EnviRenew process and built bonds with their local neighborhood organization

level of service to neighborhood residents by using the neighborhood organizations’ local knowledge.

EnviRenew is a true triple-bottom-line fund: its emphasis on community capacity is matched by its aims to improve the physical and economic characteristics of each neighborhood. EnviRenew improves the sustainability and

Katrina. These grants allow local residents to move back to their communities, reducing the blight that has

More information about EnviRenew is available at http://www.envirenew.org.

Case Study #2: Citizen Corps Councils

The Citizen Corps Program was founded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after September 11, 2001, to coordinate volunteer activities that support disaster preparedness and community safety. Since the founding of the program, over 1,100 communities have started their own local Citizen Corps Councils. Citizen Corps focuses on the pre-disaster side of community capacity: it helps to bring people together to take part in volunteer activities such as Neighborhood Watch, community policing, and community disaster preparedness education.

It is often easier to create a spirit of community leadership after a disaster, when many tasks need to be accomplished, than before a disaster when the need to complete projects and create bonds seems less immediate to many residents with their own busy lives. Citizen Corps Councils help to keep these skills and bonds more immediate and impart the lessons needed to maintain public safety on an everyday basis, so that citizens will be armed with knowledge of their communities and the disaster preparedness and recovery system in the event that a disaster does occur.

More information about the Citizen Corps Program is available at http://www.citizencorps.gov.

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Social Capital: Attract External Resources

A community has social capital when it has resources and strong advocates that are able to leverage these resources through partnerships, relationships, and skilled communication and negotiation. Social capital helps communities to attract and leverage external resources to help in their disaster mitigation and

The ability to navigate political systems to have needs met by a government agency.The ability to attract private investment from businesses, corporations, banks, or funds.The ability to attract grants from local and

The ability to attract recovery funds from the federal government after a disaster.

Social capital creation relies on the development of relationships, leadership, social skills, and bodies

that requires understanding of different vocabularies, different power structures, and different means of

communication. Communities with higher levels of wealth or education often have more members who are versed in the appropriate means of communication or who have existing relationships with those in power, and are more likely to be able to access external resources; this means that other, less skilled communities can often be left out during the distribution of resources. Cities and neighborhoods that establish strategic partnerships with corporations, universities, national

gap by providing all communities with a strategic level of support in developing their social capital.

Social capital is a complementary skill to community capacity, and some communities are stronger in one area than the other. The presence of high levels of social capital can often make up for low community capacity, and vice versa; however communities that have both strong community capacity and strong social capital will be the most socially resilient in the event of a disaster.

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Social Capital: Attract External Resources

Case Study: Neighborhood Empowerment Network University

San Francisco’s Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) is dedicated to bringing disaster resilience to neighborhoods through civic engagement, disaster preparedness education, and support for collective action to reach neighborhood goals. As part of reaching this goal, NEN has established the Neighborhood Empowerment Network University (NENu), which creates partnerships between neighborhoods and universities like San Francisco State University, the University of California at San Francisco, and the University of San Francisco. EnviRenew Resilience principal Daniel Homsey has played a crucial role in establishing the resilience models within NEN and NENu.

NENu’s partnerships create social capital by having universities act as facilitators for communities to set priorities

communities’ priority projects. The partnerships proceed through the following steps:

The second step is to conduct a “Listening and Mapping Tour” in which the universities interview local stakeholders, perform a physical asset mapping process, and convene local leaders and residents to discuss the community’s priorities and potential short-term projects.Once the community selects short-term projects to execute, the third step in the process is “Capacity Building,” in which the universities help access resources, train community leaders, aid community problem solving, and support the establishment of a Community Council which will take the leadership in execution of these projects.Finally, the last step is to establish a long-term planning process for community projects and the Community Council, and to continue providing the council with the tools it needs to address these long-term community

The process thus allows communities to set their own priorities, and to use the university partner as an advocate and supporter as the community builds its internal capacity.

Zones is at http://empowersf.org/?page_id=1019.

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Manage Expectations for the Long-Term Recovery Timeline

Most citizens of disaster-prone areas are aware that they will need items such as bottled water or

– they have expectations about the immediate needs that disaster brings. However, managing citizens’ expectations for long-term recovery is also extremely important to ensure that residents are prepared to recover their homes and belongings, and that they understand the recovery timeline so they can decide when it will be practical to return home.

In pre-disaster mitigation situations, families should be offered clear information about long-term disaster

impacts. For example, homeowners need to know that they will still be responsible for their mortgages after a disaster, even though their homes may be destroyed or unlivable; this means families may essentially have to pay for housing twice. Residents also need to know what their homeowners’ and other insurance will cover in the event of a disaster, and what types of disasters their homes are truly vulnerable to. In New Orleans, many families did not have all the appropriate types of

addition to their basic homeowners’ insurance. Some of these families have been unable to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina, leaving them displaced and the city blighted with vacant, damaged homes. In San Francisco, many families do not realize that even new homes built to the most up-to-date building code are designed to only prevent loss of life during a major earthquake, but they may be uninhabitable after a disaster or require lengthy and costly repairs without additional seismic mitigation measures.

In post-disaster situations, families need clear timelines for disaster recovery milestones to help manage expectations. Immediate milestones include

restoration of electricity, the availability of fresh water, and other basic early recovery steps that address basic needs – families need to know that even this essential infrastructure may take weeks or months to return in an acute disaster. Longer-term milestones are also critical to community health, and include such steps as the availability of federal funding for rebuilding housing, the return of employment and income, the restoration of grocery stores, the reopening of schools, and the projections for resettlement of full city blocks or neighborhoods.

Finally, families need to understand that after a disaster, they will be asked to take part in a re-imagining process that will help impact their community’s future development. Preparing citizens ahead of time and re-emphasizing this principle after a disaster event helps drive home the message that while things may not look the same after a disaster, there is a chance for them to become even “better than before.”

Some tools, such as the University of Minnesota’s Family Financial Toolkit, are available to help families in disaster recovery situations navigate these new systems and make plans using their knowledge

The availability of this information will help families do personal planning based on their knowledge of

schooling, and their ability to recover their housing.

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Manage Expectations for the Long-Term Recovery Timeline

Case Study: Family Financial Toolkit

The Family Financial Toolkit from the University of Minnesota Extension Service and the North Dakota University

disaster. This toolkit sets expectations for the obstacles families will face and the many tools and organizations that can help to overcome these obstacles. It includes the names of key resources in disaster situations, such as

This toolkit has several strengths as a resource for setting families’ long-term expectations:

First, it was developed in collaboration with an advisory board of disaster recovery professionals, which allowed the authors to draw on a wealth of experience to ensure that the information in the toolkit was complete,

Second, the authors consulted a focus group of both citizens and professionals to ensure the toolkit was accessible to the public. Third, the document includes tools like calendars and provides real-world examples of how one family used these tools in their recovery process, lending clarity and authenticity to the toolkit. Finally, the toolkit is customizable, with two Minnesota and North Dakota versions already in place; localities can take the toolkit and insert information on local long-term recovery organizations, funding opportunities, and housing resources, so that local residents will be able to tap the resources that are available quickly and easily.

A general version of this toolkit, as well as the locally customized versions for Minnesota and North Dakota, is

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The days and weeks after a disaster can be confusing and overwhelming, and are always full of activity as existing plans for disaster response and management

of long-term recovery tasks unless an accountability plan is already in place. Over time, this confusion can create overlapping agencies trying to do the

and frustration for families and residents. Cities and even regions need to expand their timeframe for thinking about disaster planning, using other disaster situations as models, in order to create a long-term recovery accountability plan before a disaster occurs.

The hallmarks of a good accountability plan are:

Explicit allocation of responsibility for the various sectors of recovery, including residential rebuilding, economic development and commercial rebuilding, infrastructure recovery, and school recovery.

Inclusion of a coordination plan to enable agencies to work together, share information to allow for more informed decision-making, and make sensible decisions that cohere as a whole. This can include fostering communication and relationships to make big decisions together about the future of the community, but for smaller day-to-day exchanges, should include digital information that is secure and consistently updated to allow all parties access to the most up-to-date information, such as CrisisCommons.org or the Coordinated Assistance Network (CAN).

Organizational structures that support accountability. Creating explicit responsibilities pertaining to resilience before a disaster occurs

is one way to ensure that institutional knowledge and experience exists to guide new employees in administering post-disaster recovery. If a disaster

agencies won’t be able to deal with the situation by including exactly the same employees and jobs that were in place before the disaster. Accountability plans should include scenarios for post-disaster agency structures and the number of new positions that would be needed.

Power that supports accountability. Giving actors like city agencies and recovery agencies the power necessary to follow through on their assigned responsibilities, including adequate staff and adequate decision-making abilities, is essential to keep bottlenecks out of the recovery process. Leadership and information continuity. Safeguarding institutional knowledge and data are essential for organizations that do long-term

plans in place for key staff, and having a secure data backup system, will allow recovery work to continue smoothly rather than being interrupted by leadership transitions or data losses.

Succession planning. As part of leadership continuity, organizations should have a succession plan that enables key information to be carried over from one leader to another and establishes policies to encourage outgoing leaders to share their knowledge and wisdom. Leader “burnout” is very common amid the trauma, stress, and immense effort of disaster recovery; succession planning helps counteract burnout’s effects.

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Case Study #1: The Disaster Accountability Project

The Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) was founded as an outsider advocacy group after Hurricane Katrina to examine the results of recovery policies and funding. DAP uses its status as an advocacy group to publicize points that many within the government and donor community cannot. Its method of engagement is to analyze the scope and scale of a disaster response and release wide-ranging reports with recommendations on overcoming problems and avoiding these problems in the future.

For example, in the U.S., DAP has noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have still not resolved a long-standing dispute over

in the event of another large-scale disaster. DAP has also released reports on the use of donor funds in Haiti’s

when they plan to use their donor funds.

For more information about the Disaster Accountability Project, visit http://www. disasteraccountability.org.

Case Study #2: Resilient SF

While DAP focuses on advocacy at the macro scale, an initiative in San Francisco is working to create accountability and resilience inside the San Francisco city government itself. Resilient SF attempts to create space for relationship-building within the city government, as well as between the government and other stakeholders including neighborhoods, researchers, schools, technology experts, and public utilities. Through its numerous

volunteerism, university-community partnerships, and earthquake risk reduction programs.

Resilient SF’s approach complements DAP’s approach; one focuses on demanding change from the outside, which the other attempts to slowly change existing systems from the inside by becoming more inclusive and working to enhance coordination so that all parties understand their potential collaborations in a disaster situation.

For more information on Resilient SF, visit http://resilientsf.org.

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The Economic Sector: Leverage Recovery Funds and Attract New Capital

In a pre-disaster or post-disaster situation, communities should pursue socially-conscious, value-driven investment that monitors existing assets and understands how all the triple bottom line aspects of a community contribute to ongoing local growth and competitiveness. This type of investment allows communities to accurately value and estimate the replacement cost of all their assets, not just the key corporations or districts within a city. It also leads


FOSTER RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT & CREATE

VALUE

UTILIZING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR LONG-

TERM COMPETITIVENESSEconomic

DISASTER EVENT

to a greater potential for both business and market continuity: businesses will have disaster response plans that enable them to maintain their supply chains and keep operating, while consumers will be able to rapidly return to their jobs and begin buying from

opportunity to invest in human capital both before

available for the long-term recovery process.

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Match Pre-disaster Preparation and Insurance Coverage to Post-Disaster Needs for Capital

Pre-disaster preparation drives two critical pieces of awareness for a metro area – the need for an accurate audit of the area’s strengths and weaknesses, and a better understanding of how much insurance coverage is required to maintain that assessed position. These two understandings are the key to pre-disaster resilience and will form the baseline studies that can be used to generate an action plan for resilience building.

A local metro area should assess its insurance coverage

key and core businesses and the related infrastructure. Rather than focus on these major assets alone, the insurance assessment should use a triple bottom line approach. The triple bottom line provides a better understanding of all the local assets that can be attributed to a local area’s competitiveness. For example, the value of local amenities such as landscape, cultural assets, and architecture can be undervalued according to a traditional model, but the triple bottom line ensures that recovery of these assets is appropriately valued.

These social and environmental assets are not simply of intrinsic value; they support the local area’s ability

to attract and retain talent and population. Talent and population are key to the quality and competitiveness of product and services that businesses and the economy can deliver back to the resident population. Ability to attract and retain an active, productive population is fundamental to delivering an economic growth rate that should improve quality of life and put a community back on a trajectory toward economic growth and social well-being. The long-term retention of population and attraction and inclusion of talent enables resilience to become a characteristic of the local area.

Insurance can therefore be understand in two ways

and the various additional, less direct aspects that can ensure competitive rebuilding. Lastly, it must

the need to rebuild at speed. This is a vital point - most insurance coverage covers recovery only after other processes are running or at least on-line. The cost for a rapid, critical mass rebuild may require a new, different type of insurance coverage.

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Residents of every community need to clearly understand what their insurance policies cover, and communities need to closely monitor the percentage of properties with private and public insurance coverage. After Hurricane Katrina caused nearly $44 billion in damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, many residents were unprepared for the coverage rejections that came from their private homeowners’ insurance. This occurred because essentially no homeowners’ and renters’ policies from private U.S.

insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in addition to traditional homeowners’ policies.

After Hurricane Katrina, many homeowners found themselves in one of two situations. First, many experienced

Homeowners who had depended on coverage from both programs to recover therefore often did not receive

By 2007, as these problems were ongoing, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had recognized that a large-scale disaster created huge payouts from NFIP without necessarily providing an adequate degree of coverage for all households to rebuild and perform necessary mitigation for the future. Since then, FEMA has been exploring solutions including:

Option 2: Replace NFIP with expanded eligibility or disaster assistance, but limit

Option 3: Provide insurance policies to communities rather than individuals

collective bargaining power to the table when homeowners must work with private insurers.

Match Pre-disaster Preparation and Insurance Coverage to Post-Disaster Needs for Capital

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Maintain Business and Market Continuity

There is a fundamental difference between business and market continuity; most economic actors will better understand this area as the supply and demand sides of the economy. Learning lessons from September 11, 2001, most sizeable businesses now have a business continuity plan. This is especially true in companies that engage in activities at the regional, national and global scale. After Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami disrupted supply chains and slowed the tech and auto industries, most companies that have global supply chains became aware of the critical need to have redundancies in those chains to ensure the

However, less attention has been paid to what we call ‘market continuity’ – simply, if there are no customers for extended periods of time, business can be severely

affected or worse. Unlike supply chains whose global aspects make them vulnerable, the more local a business or the denser the revenue stream is within a local market, the more vulnerable the business is to a geographically concentrated event. The most affected will be local businesses, who depend almost exclusively on local supply chains and a local customer base. Loss of market continuity could devastate local businesses. However, the local operation of a global or national company which has lost its local customer base in a disaster affected area will also see a sharp

return. In this case, the loss of customer base simply means that the company removes operations from that locale, with minimal disruption to the larger company, until the market returns. Note the slow return of well-known brands in New Orleans after Katrina.

The Red Cross Ready Rating Program addresses the supply side of the market, or the business continuity portion, by providing businesses a combined checklist and scorecard that encompasses the steps that can

basic steps such as consulting with local emergency management agencies to assess vulnerabilities, assessing potential disaster impacts, planning for immediate disaster response, creating a Continuity of Operations plan for long-term recovery, and embedding the preparedness plan through drills, training, and exercises.

Besides these basic steps in preparing a business continuity plan, the Ready Rating System also encourages businesses to get involved in disaster preparedness for the broader community. It takes companies through potential options such as hosting blood drives, volunteering company facilities as community shelters, leading preparedness education sessions for local residents, or sponsoring a local school district’s emergency preparedness preparations. While many of these steps focus on short-term disaster preparedness rather than long-term recovery, the relationships built between businesses, schools, families, and disaster recovery non-

recovery of schools can help employees return sooner after a disaster, or a relationship with a relief and recovery organization may help a business in gauging the long-term recovery and market potential of the surrounding area.

ECONOMIC SECTOR

Case Study: Red Cross Ready Rating Program

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ECONOMIC SECTOR

Invest in Human Capital as Well as Industries

Case Study: Chamber of Commerce

The national Chamber of Commerce system represents and communicates with approximately three million businesses, 96% of which are small businesses with less than 100 employees. In a disaster situation when the business environment is uncertain and businesses may consider relocation, the Chamber of Commerce provides an inroad for information on recovery timelines, economic development plans, and recovery funds for businesses to reestablish themselves locally. After a tornado hit Worcester, MA in June 2011, the local Chamber of Commerce set up an information page telling local residents how to register with FEMA for recovery programs, how to deal with

the devastating May 2011 tornado in Joplin, MO, and followed up by establishing a business recovery donation fund that supports donors by giving them tax credits from the state of Missouri for donations over $1,000.

The local Chambers of Commerce are supported in disaster recovery by the Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC), part of the national U.S. Chamber of Commerce organization. The BCLC helps establish national best practices for businesses facing disaster, as well as businesses that want to support short-

For more information on the Business Civic Leadership Center, visit http://bclc.uschamber.com/.

Recovery of a disaster-affected local area is largely contingent on population retention after a disaster event. In anecdotal observations of recent disasters, it appears that most local areas should only expect to receive up to 70 or 80% of their original population back – regardless of how strong and effective the

campaign will ensure every single disaster surviving individual or household will return. This is more about psychological human responses to traumatic events than the inability to rebuild. Some individuals after experiencing a traumatic event do not wish to return to the site of the event, sometimes ever.

Therefore, for a local area to maximize the use of funding and reset itself on a path to sustainable growth, the need to attract and retain new human capital after a disaster is key. This will require a profound awareness and valuing of the inclusion of new parties in community and economic activity. The cultural impacts to local communities and areas will be changing and will require sensitive leadership from civic and business leaders.

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The Physical Sector: Adapt the Physical Environ-ment with Standards, Maps, Data, and Plans

Adapting the physical environment to disaster is an iterative process: new standards and policies improve a community’s resistance to disaster-related damage, while constant updates to maps, data, and city plans ensure that further strengths and weaknesses can be

policies, maps, and data can help communities return to better housing stock, more neighbors, and a higher quality of life than before. However, careless standards or policies that don’t account for the real estate market or the availability of recovery funding can cause a community to lose population and become seriously blighted after a disaster event.

The following chapter focuses on case studies that illustrate different approaches to physical mitigation and recovery such as setting new construction standards, changing policies that may affect residents’ ability to rebuild their homes, and restoring land and buildings to commerce. These approaches are different from the basic physical protections that disaster preparedness requires, such as tornado cellars

important to keep families and communities safe in the short run during and after a disaster; the measures in this chapter help ensure that communities are able to quickly, easily and strongly rebuild over the long term.


MAP ASSETS AND MITIGATE

VULNERABILITIES

BUILD BACK BETTERPhysical

DISASTER EVENT

2C

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Note: The homes pictured above are two of the homes that EnviRenew has subsidized in partnership with a neighborhood organization in New Orleans, as part of the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. The above homes are in the Algiers Riverview neighborhood.

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Maintain Actionable and Enforceable Physical Plans

Regardless of the potential for disaster, every city needs a process for regularly updating a legally enforceable general plan for the city’s physical development potential. After a disaster, cities that already have progressive, up-to-date general and

of reinventing themselves: the data and community input included in these plans can form the foundation of a physical vision that will already be grounded in community consensus. This will allow cities to focus on establishing the legal and economic structures needed to quickly reestablish commerce and maintain competitiveness. If a city does not have up-to-date plans, it will need to spend more time building consensus around a new vision for the future rather than setting goals based on a preexisting future vision.

Though a good pre-disaster plan is a key element in creating community resilience, every disaster brings unexpected consequences and can require alterations to preexisting plans. These alterations can be based on safety concerns that emerge for rebuilding in certain areas; they should also account for the inescapable fact that after a major disaster, population will return slowly, over time, and only 70-80% of the original population may return at all. Cities will need to quickly set actionable goals using pre-existing plans as basic frameworks, but basing actions around new

A good example of a strong pre-disaster plan is San Francisco’s General Plan, which is kept up-to-date and is required by California law to address seven factors that make this plan extremely comprehensive. Each of these important physical features has an

“element” within the General Plan that explains the broad strategy that community members and planners

use maps and data to address neighborhood concerns. The seven factors are:

Land use (what can be built where)

Housing Conservation (of energy, water, and resources)Open space (parks and recreational areas)NoiseSafety (including disaster preparedness)

In order to assure a swift and smooth rebuilding process, the Community Safety Element in San Francisco’s General Plan states that, after a disaster, the rebuilding of the city will be based on what is written and mapped in the plan. This creates less of a need to build consensus around a forward-looking plan: the vision already exists and accounts for the interplay of the many factors needed to build a quality city.

A contrasting view comes from New Orleans, where many citizens gradually slipped into “planning fatigue” during the Hurricane Katrina long-term recovery process, because the planning process became a wish list rather than an allocation of available resources over time. Without a visionary pre-disaster plan, or a strong sense of future funding opportunities, the planning process created distrust in New Orleans communities because implementation had to constantly backslide

early planning process. New Orleans’ experience

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illustrates the need to set actionable goals based on estimated funding and recovery timelines. Recovery funds (especially government funds) arrive in an affected area over time, and residents come back over time. Disaster-affected communities need to combine a careful estimate of the total funds needed for recovery with a constant careful monitoring of the

pace of market recovery: market recovery includes infrastructure, housing, schools, and businesses.

Case Study: Central Business District Recovery in Christchurch

In Christchurch, urban plans made before the 2011 earthquake did not account for the fact that many of downtown’s classic masonry and stonework structures would not survive a major tremor. Recovery of the Christchurch Central Business District therefore required the production of a new vision for the area. Christchurch turned to both residents and experts to propose ideas for new ways to rebuild.

Residents contributed their thoughts through the Christchurch “share an idea” program, which included an online forum for discussion and public meetings with City Council members. This program has resulted in a new design for the CBD with a smaller footprint, more public transit and public space, and lower-rise, safer buildings.

masonry and concrete structures to steel-framed constructions that are more seismically resilient. They have also created a detailed proposal for a “Quake Star” rating system for earthquake safety in buildings.

To help set long-term recovery deadlines and coordinate the recovery process, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) was created to cut across bureaucratic lines. CERA’s Draft Recovery Strategy sets out many of the basic timelines for the production of economic, social, environmental, and built environment recovery, including timelines for plan production, demolitions that will allow plan implementation, and social programs to help purchase insured properties that lie in designated no-build “red zones” due to earthquake risk.

Though the recovery is progressing, many of the processes in CERA’s plan have taken up to a year to complete due to ongoing aftershock tremors as well as administrative capacity challenges, and citizens have urgent concerns about the length of time it has taken to understand what the future holds. Tensions between immediate action and good long-term planning will always exist. Pursuing actionable goals can help alleviate but not eliminate these tensions.

For more information on the “share an idea” program, visit http://www.rebuildchristchurch.co.nz/blog/2011/6/the-rebuild-christchurch-ideas.

For more information on the QuakeStar proposal, visit http://www.quakestar.org.nz/.

For more information on the Draft Recovery Strategy, visit http://cera.govt.nz/.

Maintain Actionable and Enforceable Physical PlansPHYSICAL

SECTOR

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Real Estate Markets

Codes, standards, and policies that affect the built and natural environments help communities to ensure the future safety, resilience, and sustainability of their populations. However, they can also restrict long-term disaster recovery when requirements are too stringent for residents to meet or have other unintended consequences. When implementing building codes,

and restrictions on new construction, it is important

possible outcomes to understand their likely effects on retaining and recovering population after a disaster.

Building codes express a community’s concern for residents’ safety and well-being by preventing residents from living in substandard housing. However, because full disaster mitigation is expensive

communities to go beyond building codes that ensure life safety toward building codes that fully encompass disaster mitigation, as this would price many potential homeowners out of the marketplace. Programs such as the Transfer Tax Rebate in Berkeley, CA help address this problem. The Transfer Tax Rebate allows new homeowners to receive a rebate of up to one-third of the “transfer tax” (tax paid when a house is sold) to

home. Because the tax is paid regardless of whether or

the program has been highly successful. This rebate represents a way of allocating public funds directly

seismic mitigation requirement to the building codes.

disaster insurance can also help improve resilience,

and government recovery funding should coordinate with these requirements in order to help homeowners reach the necessary standards. After Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, insurance companies became more stringent in requiring homes to be elevated past the FEMA requirements in order to obtain insurance at a reasonable price. Many homeowners could not afford this elevation, so a government program using recovery dollars was put in place to help elevate homes. However, this program did not begin subsidizing elevation until three years after Katrina occurred, which created a great deal of extra expense as many homeowners had already rebuilt and then needed to elevate later, rather than doing the rebuilding all at once. This issue illustrates the need for coordination between the timelines of recovery dollars, rebuilding procedures, and insurance requirements.

New standards and policies can also damage recovery,

not made available to help property owners build or rebuild to the new, higher standards that are put in place. For example, in New Orleans, the Road Home program was designed to help homeowners rebuild, but homeowners received funds based on the pre-Katrina value of their home, not the cost of new construction of a similar home. This created vast inequities between neighborhoods that had lower real estate values and those with higher values; historically African-American neighborhoods were especially hard-hit, because their pre-storm values were lower than the cost of building a new home and families therefore received inadequate funds for rebuilding. This left many families and residents unable to rebuild their homes, despite

became tied up in a lengthy process of arbitration.

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Number of Renters

Housing Market(Condo Units)

Housing Market(Rental Units)

Time (Years)

EVENT

Diagram 16. Consequences of Rental Housing Loss Post-Disaster

Finally, existing policies about new construction can also have unanticipated consequences after a disaster, when new construction may occur at scale and can affect the character of a community. In San Francisco, where two-thirds of residents rent, there are restrictions on the conversion of rental housing to for-sale condominiums to maintain affordability and keep the city diverse. However, these restrictions no longer apply once a building is demolished and rebuilt; a building owner can then replace affordable rentals

an earthquake, this policy could lead to unnecessary demolitions and a sharp decrease in the amount of affordable rental property available to residents, unless appropriate legal changes and subsidies are put in place to help maintain affordable rental property.

Real Estate Markets

Case Study: NORA and the 50 HERS Rating Standard

Most new building standards and codes create added expense for builders and developers, and therefore they create added expense for those who want to buy property. After a disaster, new standards and codes should be weighed carefully to consider both how they protect families, and the amount of added expense they generate.

After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) wanted to ensure that developers and

administered a federal subsidy program that would help developers rebuild homes for middle-class and working-class families who would otherwise be unable to return to their houses because the expense of rebuilding was too great. In many cases, this was not because the homeowners were irresponsible, but rather because their home values were lower than the cost of replacing and elevating their homes, so they did not receive enough insurance money to fully rebuild.

In trying to set a high standard, NORA required that half of the houses receiving these subsidies obtain a 50 Home Energy Rating System Index (HERS) Index or better; the others had to achieve a 70 HERS Index. HERS is a method of

of energy usage for a house – it must use approximately half the energy of a code-compliant home of the same size, which would have a HERS rating of 100. As a reference point, the Builders Challenge program from the U.S. Department of Energy requires that buildings have a HERS Index of 70, or use about 70% the energy of a code-compliant home.

Furthermore, the additional time spent re-specifying caused further delays to the already slow rebuild process in low and moderate-income neighborhoods. The requirement has also raised the price of houses overall so that fewer working-class families are able to gather the remaining money to rebuild their homes using these federal subsidies, creating a more exclusive housing market and reducing the scale and speed at which neighborhoods can recover.

PHYSICAL SECTOR

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Keep Land and Buildings in Commerce Post-disaster by Creating Streamlined, Place-focused Processes

in their properties.

An essential step after a disaster is to evaluate whether buildings can be immediately reoccupied and restored to their current use, or whether they need to be rehabilitated or demolished. Some disasters that have a risk of recurring regularly, such as earthquakes or

unusable. Land and buildings will be out of commerce during this evaluation period, which will make it

Given that these obstacles will always have a negative effect on the real estate market, helping willing residents overcome the many obstacles in the

neighborhoods are returning, and will reduce the number of residents who leave the community out of frustration or trauma caused by the disaster and lengthy recovery process. Streamlining processes by providing one central agency liaison and set of required documentation, as well as ensuring that

recovery proceed quickly and at scale.

efforts at streamlining processes, a certain percentage

including:

Properties without clear title. These properties are especially prevalent in historic neighborhoods or neighborhoods with high percentages of long-

term family ownership. After Hurricane Katrina, many properties that had been family-owned for generations did not have clear title allocated to one person in the family, which created obstacles when family members applied for recovery funds or tried to gain permission to rebuild these properties.

Properties that have been voluntarily sold to the government. Some owners may choose not to return, and may sell their properties to a government entity (necessitating resale or some form of land banking).

Abandoned properties. Other owners who do not return may simply abandon their properties, requiring administrative work to track them down or extract the property from their control.

Creating geographically-focused processes of recovery and blight remediation can help to get these

Next-door neighbors, neighborhood organizations,

remain unoccupied or blighted. Assisting these local individuals and organizations to buy the properties is a proven strategy for moving properties off the city’s maintenance docket and back into occupation and commerce.

PHYSICAL SECTOR

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Case Study #1: Building Occupation Resumption Program

San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection has created the Building Occupancy Resumption Program (BORP) as a tool to help expedite post-earthquake recovery for key buildings and businesses. The program allows building

avoiding a potentially very long wait for a city employee to inspect the building and approve it for re-occupancy.

Before the earthquake, the building owner must work with an approved engineer to perform an initial inspection to identify the building’s structural system and prepare documents to be readily available for the post-earthquake inspection, such as construction drawings and an emergency inspection plan that is tailored

the building owner will then already have in place a relationship and agreement with an engineer and a specialized checklist for their post earthquake inspection. These documents must be maintained and updated annually. After an earthquake, the inspection plan can be quickly implemented and the building re-occupied.

This type of program is especially useful for buildings that house essential services or major employers that are critical to the economic health of the area. To date, 47 buildings in San Francisco have a BORP contract in place.

Case Study #2: Louisiana Land Trust Properties

The Louisiana Land Trust (LLT) was established after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to absorb the properties of homeowners who did not wish to return to their original Louisiana homes after the disaster. The owners of these properties allowed the state of Louisiana to purchase their properties from them after these disasters, and the state then placed them into this public land trust. The mission of the LLT was

hold or transfer a property interest in housing stock damaged by Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita.”

The LLT faced a number of challenges in distributing the properties it owned: it did not have the power, resources, and

the properties to commerce. This was partially because local agencies were made responsible for selling the

in neglect from the new owners. But even when private sector developers or residents wished to buy the properties

both the LLT and the local agencies. As of 2012, the LLT has had to shut down due to lack of continued operating funds and return thousands of properties to municipalities across the state. The municipalities will now have to

the hands of neighborhoods and residents: the geographically-focused “Lot Next Door” program. This program allowed the neighbors living next door to vacant lots to purchase them for a very low price in return for a promise to maintain and use these lots. This program was successful because it recognized the need to distribute these

maintaining the property. As of January 2012, this program had distributed 667 total lots, with an additional 400

Keep Land and Buildings in Commerce Post-disaster by Creating Streamlined, Place-focused Processes

PHYSICAL SECTOR

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Monitor the Physical Environment Using Open Data Sets and Informative Maps of Recovery

The ability to monitor the physical environment

organizations, and residents making their data available for government and public use. Crowdsourcing of information is useful immediately after a disaster and in long-term recovery, because one agency often cannot effectively monitor recovery progress over an entire city or town without help from other volunteer organizations. CrisisCommons and Ushahidi are two groups that have used crowdsourced online maps and data to monitor immediate post-disaster needs for rescue workers and emergency services.

In the short-term disaster response timeline, accuracy

advantage of having real-time information from numerous sources to provide emergency services usually outweighs these concerns. During long-term recovery, organizations often caretake and formalize data distribution by displaying census and local government data sets for the public in order to monitor recovery progress. In New Orleans, organizations such as the Greater New Orleans Data Center and WhoData have been developed to share data sets from

the New Orleans city government has also begun distributing geographically-based blight data and other neighborhood data on its website.

Having up-to-date maps of recovery progress over time allows community members, governments, and organizations to hold one another accountable for recovery progress as it appears on the ground, rather

the correct scale. Resilience comes from making interventions at multiple physical scales, from altering individual buildings, to improving neighborhoods and their community assets, to upgrading the broad regional transportation and infrastructure systems.

At the building scale, it’s important to look at many of the issues already discussed in this section: the standards and policies that create more disaster-resistant buildings, and the need to keep these individual features monitored to understand progress on putting them back into commerce. Maps of recovery and blight can reveal where these strategies are succeeding, and where they may be stalling or holding up the progress of recovery.

At the neighborhood scale, it is important to combine maps of housing recovery with maps that

Image: Parcel Map used for Beacon of Hope Community Surveys.

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show the recovery of key assets like schools, parks, and retail stores to understand the interrelationships of the recovery of these types of assets.

At the infrastructure or systems scale, maps of important lifelines and access to transportation will help identify key assets and vulnerabilities. This image, from the Dutch Dialogues water management planning process in New Orleans, provides a good example of a map that successfully diagrams a regional process with changes to major infrastructure.

Image: Water Infrastructure Planning at the Systems Level.

Case Study: Beacon of Hope Resource Center

The Beacon of Hope Resource Center was founded in New Orleans’ Lakeview neighborhood, one of the hardest-hit areas during Hurricane Katrina. Beacon of Hope uses both citizen involvement and mapping expertise to gather data and represent the progress of recovery in New Orleans neighborhoods.

Early on in the recovery process, Beacon of Hope created walking maps to enable neighbors to report the progress of recovery on a block-by-block basis and identify blighted properties and infrastructure problems. Initially, the

in identifying the reasons behind the blighted properties and helping to rectify the underlying causes of weak

returning and try to help remove those obstacles, or to identify why the new owner has not made improvements.

Currently, Beacon of Hope is working to develop online and smartphone applications so that citizens

checking through the data to reduce or eliminate potential errors and incomplete data entry problems.

Monitor the Physical Environment Using Open Data Sets and Informative Maps of Recovery

PHYSICAL SECTOR

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Notes

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EnviRenew Resilience Report Part 1 : Creating Resilient Communities

KEYPOINTS

MISSION STATEMENT

“Resilience is the capacity of a system to be able to prevent, withstand, absorb, adapt to, or bounce back from a shock (whether the shock is sudden, evolving or cascading). It is, in part, reaching a point where a community is able to mitigate, absorb, and manage its vulnerabilities.”-Doug Ahlers, “Acting In Time Initiative”

DEFINING RESILIENCE

“Create a compelling, actionable, and inclusive process for sustainable community resilience and recovery.”- Developed by EnviRenew Resilience Principals and Interns, June 2011

TOOLS FOR THINKINGCommunities can experience “fast” disasters, characterized by a sudden shock to a thriving community; “slow” disasters, characterized by an ongoing process of disinvestment and decay; or “hybrid” disasters, which include both sudden

long-term recovery actions.

Disaster recovery proceeds through distinct short-term and long-term phases. Communities that understand these phases will be able to plan ahead and maximize their use of resources and funding during the long-term recovery process.

years before government funding and donor dollars move on to another disaster elsewhere. Establishing a long-term

Reaching a critical mass of investors that want to return to a city, neighborhood, or block will create a “tipping point” that allows the private market to continue this long-term

resources to quickly rebuild it will help generate the investor

resources and imagination to “tip” their communities into

this ability are unlikely to recover to their previous level of social welfare.

TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE FRAMEWORKThe triple bottom line approach considers the social, economic, and physical assets of a community and shows how these assets are interlinked. Resilience relies on strengthening all of these aspects of a local environment in order to create value.

SOCIAL SECTORCommunity capacity allows a community to use its internal

Social capital allows a community to access external assets by leveraging its internal resources.

Keeping citizens informed about the long-term recovery timeline will help retain population after a disaster.

Creating an accountability plan enables coordination,

where to access rebuilding resources.

ECONOMIC SECTOR

Using a triple bottom line approach to value community

after a disaster - both are critical to sustain a local economy.

Investing in human capital (existing residents and new-comers) will reduce blight, retain businesses, and create strong social bonds.

PHYSICAL SECTOR

Creating actionable, enforceable, forward-looking urban plans will help communities reach their potential in rebuilding after disaster.

Policies and standards for rebuiding can improve a community; however, if not carefully evaluated, they can also hamper recovery or create unintended consequences.

Streamlined, place-focused rebuilding processes will enable neighborhoods to rebuild with speed and at scale.

Using open data sets and mapping recovery data will help create new, nimble geographic recovery strategies.

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Notes KEYPOINTS



For additional copies, please contact:

The Salvation Army - Southern TerritoryTerritorial Disaster Coordinator1424 Northeast ExpresswayAtlanta, GA 30329.



Rose FlenorlShane O’Connor

Doug AhlersBob BerkebileMajor Ethan FrizzellMajor Wayne FroderbergRichard GravesDaniel HomseyLindsay JonkerGerald McSwigganShane O’ConnorJoyce Rosenthal

Dana BrechwaldJoshua DavisAndrea DorotanTravis Sheehan

For additional copies, please contact:

The Salvation Army - Southern TerritoryTerritorial Disaster Coordinator1424 Northeast ExpresswayAtlanta, GA 30329.

SPONSORED BY

EnviRenew Resilience Report, Part 1: Creating Resilient Communities2011The Salvation Army - Southern TerritoryThe Salvation Army, Area Command of Greater New Orleans | EnviRenew

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Creating Resilient Communities